District 9
Posted on August 23, 2009 at 11:25 pm by kyliu
Tags: movies, war crimes
Filed Under seen | Leave a Comment |
District 9 is a hard film to see. It’s an even harder film to think about. American viewers (and perhaps Western viewers in general) will likely think of the film as an allegory about Apartheid, and nothing but Apartheid. But that is missing the film’s richness and its moral complexities.
Of course the parallels with Apartheid are legion — the forced resettlements, the “separateness,” the name “District 9,” etc. But parallels with other atrocities in the history of “first contact” between the races, and the subsequent colonial exploitation, should not be ignored. I would like to note, for American viewers, two other parallels that may not be as obvious in this film.
The Anglo-American Colonial Experience
One of the issues the film touches on is the obsession with legalism in the colonial history of the West, especially in the Anglo-American tradition.
Wikus van der Merwe, as you recall, goes around to each prawn shack, and asks them to sign a note acknowledging their receipt of an “eviction order.” Wilkus strides fearlessly up to each prawn and asks them to sign the meaningless document, a task that eventually causes a prawn to break his arm. Was he stupid to have persisted at this task when it was clear that the prawns were very strong and dangerous?
No, he was not stupid, he was arrogant. And he was arrogant because he was confident that his task — the removal of the prawn to concentration camps (his own words) was a humanitarian gesture justified by legality, which, in his mind, meant that it was also moral. Viewed in this light, that signature from the prawns was vitally important, because it would give their removal legal imprimatur.
The general audience might not be moved by this, but every American lawyer should be reminded, by Wilkus’s document, of the history of America’s “legal” taking of land by conquest from the Native Americans.
Alexis de Tocqueville said it best:
The conduct of the Americans of the United States toward the natives … breathes the purest love of forms and legality. If by chance an Indian nation can no longer live on its territory, they take it like a brother by the hand and lead it to die outside the country of its fathers… One cannot destroy men while being more respectful of the laws of humanity.
Democracy in America, I.2.10.
Or, think of the words of Justice Marshall, in Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823):
Conquest gives a title which the courts of the conqueror cannot deny, whatever the private and speculative opinions of individuals may be, respecting the original justice of the claim which has been successfully asserted.
…
What was the inevitable consequence of this state of things? The Europeans were under the necessity either of abandoning the country and relinquishing their pompous claims to it or of enforcing those claims by the sword, and by the adoption of principles adapted to the condition of a people with whom it was impossible to mix and who could not be governed as a distinct society, or of remaining in their neighborhood, and exposing themselves and their families to the perpetual hazard of being massacred.
Frequent and bloody wars, in which the whites were not always the aggressors, unavoidably ensued. European policy, numbers, and skill prevailed. As the white population advanced, that of the Indians necessarily receded. The country in the immediate neighborhood of agriculturists became unfit for them. The game fled into thicker and more unbroken forests, and the Indians followed.
And so legality substitutes for moral justice, and we believe that a piece of paper excuses blood and death and torture. In many ways, naked conquest is more justifiable than this civilized hypocrisy of “legal” oppression.
This attention to legality over morality can be seen in many other aspects of Anglo-American moral reasoning: the belief that the “treaties” that Great Britain and other Western powers forced China and other semi-colonized nations to sign at the point of the sword in the 19th century could have any legal or moral force; the belief that what matters is whether practices like waterboarding are “legal” rather than if they are moral; the belief that “war crimes” can be defined by reference to the “laws of war” rather than the laws of moral justice and conscience.
District 9’s comments on the legal fiction at the core of the history of the West’s colonial development is trenchant.
Unit 731
The worst of MNU’s crimes against the prawns is the secret program of medical experiments performed on the prawns in an effort to develop better weapons — in this case, access to prawn weapons.
There are some scenes in the film which make no sense at all from a purely logical point of view. For example, why did the doctors of MNU decide to vivisect Wilkus when they wanted to “harvest” his soft organs to obtain the secret of prawn DNA and compatibility with prawn weapons? Wouldn’t it have been just as effective to just kill him or anesthetize him first?
This choice by the filmmakers only makes sense when this section of the film is viewed as an allegory for the crimes of Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII.
Unit 731 also performed medical experiments on thousands of Chinese prisoners in order to develop better weapons — in their case, biological weapons like cholera, anthrax, and the bubonic plague. There were no survivors of Unit 731.
The doctors of Unit 731 vivisected men, women, children, and infants to study the effects of disease and other medical phenomena. The vivisections were often done without any anesthesia so that the results would not be affected by the drugs.
When “Christopher Johnson,” the only prawn given human emotions, stands mute before the charred remains of a prawn destroyed in MNU’s medical experiments, he must have felt as the Chinese visitors feel today when they visit the small museum in Harbin commemorating these unspeakable atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army.
These atrocities are little known in the West — in part due to lack of interest, and in part due to active cover up by Western governments. General MacArthur granted all members of Unit 731 immunity from war crimes charges in order to obtain the results of their experiments for use in the United States’ own biological weapons program, and active support for Japan as a counterweight to China, an important part of post-WWII American policy, has made it inconvenient to bring up the atrocities committed by Japanese military doctors during WWII.
These two are not the only moral issues referenced by the film. There are many other atrocities and injustices evoked in District 9 through a congeries of vivid details: the flamethrower being directed at the eggs of the prawns; the delight with which Wilkus slaughtered those young and joked about keeping “souvenirs”; the label “terrorist” thrown onto Wilkus; the persistent condescension and racial superiority assumed by the “talking heads” interviewed for the mockumentary who presume to speak as experts about the prawns; the racial divide that persists among the post-Apartheid humans; the sexual undertone and fear and exploitation in the reference to “inter-species prostitution”; etc., etc. But I hope I have highlighted two references that may not be obvious at first to American viewers.
District 9 is a complex film, and it’s too easy and too confining to see it as simply an Apartheid parable. It’s a lot more than that.
Related posts
Comments
Leave a Reply